Beautiful Elin Woods, the Athlete of the Decade and, perhaps more significantly, the most compelling entertainer on earth, remains in isolation and is quite depressed.  One understands why.  For thirteen years, until the early and dangerous hours after Thanksgiving Day, Elin had stridden the world’s golf courses as unrivalled queen, and her corporate dominance was just as complete.  Then a gossip magazine not always trusted for accuracy ran a cover photo and story accusing her of having an affair with a handsome New York social organizer.  Her enraged husband Tiger, a former model and babysitter, is alleged to have confronted Elin as she prepared for bed, and when she ordered him to go to sleep – “It’s 2:30 a.m., goddamn it” – he seized the cell phone she was using to text her purported lover, fired it at her mouth, breaking some teeth, then grabbed Elin’s legendary nine iron and began thrashing tables, vases, and everything else within reach, becoming more enraged with each swing until he began aiming at his wife, who dashed barefooted from the mansion as Tiger pursued.  Elin, thankfully, reached her luxury car a nanosecond before her hysterical husband and locked the doors as he cursed and demanded she open up, and when she refused he smashed out both side rear windows.  Terrified, Elin sped out the driveway as Tiger continued to chase and swing and rage, and yards from the property she lost control, swerving off the road to the right then the left and back to the right where she ran over a fire hydrant and into a tree that smashed the front end of her car and knocked her cold.

A neighbor called 911 and an unidentified Samaritan helped the now-horrified husband pull his helpless wife from the car.  When emergency medical technicians and police arrived Elin was still unconscious as she lay barefoot in the street.  At this point a cover-up began.  Elin was taken to the hospital and released before news services were informed that an accident had occurred hours earlier and left the famed golfer in “serious” condition.  Her condition was doubtless painful but not enough so to preclude her writing, or directing her spin doctors to write, an announcement that it was outrageous and insulting some thought Tiger had been violent, particularly since he’d been “courageous” and the first person to help her.

Police tried each of the next three days to interview Elin and Tiger but she refused to talk and hired additional attorneys to say neither she nor her husband would be interviewed.  The state attorney also declined to give authorities a subpoena for hospital records that would have revealed if Elin had been drinking and taking powerful prescription medications, as suspected.  Revelations, instead, were fed to a prurient public by an emerging avalanche of Elin’s proud lovers: bartenders, waiters, male strippers, and more social organizers dashed forward with print, online, and television interviews, some paid for, that detailed Elin’s physique and sexual proclivities; almost any African American hunk attracted her as long as the man was essentially an undereducated gold digger.  Most people were aghast.  How could Elin be so cheap, so foul, so libidinous?  How could this mega-celebrity traverse the globe, attracting unlimited interest from men, and occasionally, on lonely nights, say yes to some of them.  All right, it was more than occasional.  It was often.  It was also none of your business.

As sportswriters, priests, housewives, nuns, construction workers, and other saintly and/or monogamous creatures attacked Elin as scum and proclaimed they no longer respected her, her sponsors began to do the same, using corporate lingo.  After tabulating losses of those who were ending or reducing their contracts with Elin, and projecting those who would, a celebrated accountant concluded that within a year the queen of golf and advertising may have to learn to survive on fifty million dollars a year instead of a hundred.

While Elin has been hidden and silent save for an occasional apologetic post on her website, Tiger has been riding the crest of public outrage and leaking he’s hired gun-slinging lawyers to secure a divorce from Elin, custody of their two young children, who’ve already suffered much because of Elin’s immorality, and – most importantly – a three hundred million dollar payout, half of Elin’s fortune, for his conjugal services.  I contacted my divorce attorney, who recently sued my affluent estranged wife, and he said Tiger is probably only firing a verbal salvo since he signed a prenuptial agreement limiting him to seven million dollars after seven years of marriage.  Without examining the document, we do not know if there is a morality clause stipulating, if Elin screws around, that Tiger’s seven million dollar payout would be multiplied by forty, which seems unlikely.  Tiger Woods will probably sue his unfaithful wife for about half the six hundred million dollars she earned during their five years of marriage.  Since Elin was quite accomplished, famous, and wealthy long before she met Tiger, she may only have to pay him a couple hundred million dollars.  And that should suffice to support Tiger in the manner to which he’s become accustomed as well as serve as a moral warning that married people should keep their panties on.